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This paper examines the shifting landscape of higher education in Turkey, highlighting a disconcerting trend of politically motivated appointments, coined as "parasailing." Departing from traditional merit-based norms, this practice of appointing professors without necessary approvals disrupts the academic environment, prompting concerns about the integrity of higher education institutions. The paper introduces the term "parasailing" to elucidate this phenomenon, emphasizing the connection between the appointed professor and their academic destination. In contrast to the widely used term "parachuting," in Turkish academia the proposed terminology offers a better understanding of the appointment process. The subsequent sections provide an overview of the Turkish academic landscape, explore the origin of the term "parachuting," review existing literature, define "parasailing," and connect it to different philosophical thoughts. Overall, this paper contributes to a broader comprehension of the challenges facing Turkish higher education, urging a reconsideration of appointment procedures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this study, we propose new attenuation relations for use in possible future macroseismicity-based analyses for Turkey. The most significant difference of the new relationships is that they are specifically designed for use in the full extent of Turkey. Besides, this paper supplies an extensive macroseismic database larger than ever collected for Turkey. To this end, a modifiable MATLAB program, which is fully presented in the electronic supplement to this paper, was written to analyze the collected isoseismal maps that were first geo-rectified and then gridded by dividing them into 0.02° arrays. The epicentral distances belonging to each point intersected with the pertinent isoseism were compiled in an event-based log. Then, all subsets were merged into a single dataset, which is presented in the electronic supplement. Required strong ground motion parameters were taken from an improved earthquake catalog recently given by Kadirioğlu et al. (B Earthq Eng 1:2, 2016). For modeling the relations, the early relations were mostly selected as patterns for our candidate attenuation models. Of all candidate models, the statistically significant ones were individually tested whether or not they were able to detect the best fitting model to our database. The predicted error margins of the proposed models were compared to those of early models using data-driven statistical tests. In conclusion, considering the usability limits, the estimation capabilities of proposed relationships were found to be useful to some extent than those of the early models developed for Turkey. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Information about several papers discussed at the Electrical and Electronics Engineering (ELECO) 2011 conference held in Bursa, Turkey on December 1-4, 2011 is presented. Topics include the comparison on the various architectures of transceivers, adjustable bandpass filtering solutions and the introduction of an active element called voltage differencing inverting buffered amplifier (VDIBA). The study on the frequency-domain models of memristor, memcapacitor and meminductor is also mentioned.

Background: In December of 2019, a new disease which is caused by SARS-CoV-2, as an epidemic disease out of Wuhan, China, began to circulate. On March 11, 2020, the Republic of Turkey Ministry of Health had announced the first case from Turkey. The aim of this study is to analyze the scientific publications in the field of COVID-19 included in Science Citation Index Expanded (SCIE) from Turkey and to establish a theoretical background for future studies in the health literature with obtained valuable information about the publications. We searched all papers published in the field of COVID-19 by using the terms of "COVID-19," "2019-n-CoV," "SARS-CoV-2," "Coronavirus disease 19," and "2019 novel coronavirus" as scientific nomenclatures of COVID-19 in the topic search section of the software. Results: Overall, 47,368 papers, indexed by SCI-E, were found related to COVID-19 between January 1, 2020, and December 13, 2020. Of these, 931 were from Turkey. In terms of specialities, the most contribution was from the Medicine General Internal followed by Dermatology. Most of the publications were article. English was the most preferred language in papers. Dermatological Theraphy published the most paper. Conclusions: Applying this kind of analysis on an intermittent basis gives a general perspective for contribution of a countries to scientific publications and useful for the further studies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Drawing on ethnographic research with the devout members of Gülen movement displaced in the aftermath of the coup attempt in 2016, this paper studies the existential crisis these formerly "proper Turkish citizens" have been experiencing after being targeted by the Turkish State. This existential crisis, as argued in this paper, is significantly informative in understanding how privilege-based ethical self-making emanates fragility. The paper, thus, both parallels Sunni-Turkish-ness with whiteness and provides a reading of ethical self-making processes the Gülenists developed vis-à-vis the notions of critique and comfort. It first looks closer at the two Islamic revivalist movements, Milli Görüş as the predecessors of Turkey's ruling AKP (Adalet ve Kalkınma Partisi/Justice and Development Party) and the Gülen Movement, their rivalry over claiming the canon and the ways in which they differ in their notions of politics, political Islam, and critique. Although critique and self-critique are integral components of ethical self-formation processes, Gülen movement takes a somewhat inconsistent approach in implementing them to the heteronomous layers of self. Meaning, that while self-critique is an essential part of ethical self-making, critiquing the movement itself, the state, nation, and ancestors (as they were imagined) are not seen as ethical acts. It concludes with an analysis of how this discrepancy results in a sporadic distribution of ethical self-formation, leading to an existential crisis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A Soft Computing technique is one of the essential problems solving techniques for the researchers present in the world. Compared to other issues solving techniques, the Soft Computing domain gives outstanding performance, so the researchers are concentrating the Soft Computing domain for solving problems. Soft Computing domain categorizes into many sub-domains, like Neural Networks, Machine Learning, and Genetic Algorithm. Through this paper, we considered to study the impact produced by the Institutions as well as authors in the domain of Soft Computing from the year 1999 to 2019 for PubMed database. From the overall study, we found that China has made more number of publications, author productivity, and influential authors. Some countries, like Russia, Saudi Arabia, and Turkey, with minimum author productivity and minimum publications from the Asian continent in the Soft Computing-related domains. From the research, we determined that china dominates in terms of Institutions wise and Author productivity in the field of Soft Computing domain. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since its inception, YouTube has been a source of entertainment and education. Everyday millions of videos are uploaded to this platform. Researchers have been using YouTube as a source of information in their research. However, there is a lack of bibliometric reports on research carried out on this platform and the pattern in the published works. This study aims at providing a bibliometric analysis on YouTube as a source of information to fill this gap. Specifically, this paper analyzes 1781 articles collected from the Scopus database spanning fifteen years. The analysis revealed that 2006-2007 were initial stage in YouTube research followed by 2008 -2017 which is the decade of rapid growth in YouTube research. The 2017 -2021 is considered the stage of consolidation and stabilization of this research topic. We also discovered that most relevant papers were published in small number of journals such as New Media and Society, Convergence, Journal of Medical Internet Research, Computers in Human Behaviour and the Physics Teacher, which proves the Bradford's law. USA, Turkey, and UK are the countries with the highest number of publications. We also present network analysis between countries, sources, and authors. Analyzing the keywords resulted in finding the trend in research such as "video sharing" (2010-2018), "web -based learning" (2012-2014), and "COVID -19" (2020 onward). Finally, we used Multiple Correspondence Analysis (MCA) to find the conceptual clusters of research on YouTube. The first cluster is related to user -generated content. The second cluster is about health and medical issues, and the final cluster is on the topic of information quality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the associations between conflict management behaviors, job satisfaction, and innovation performance as felt by 322 blue-collar workers in supermarket chains in Istanbul. The authors collected data through direct and virtual surveys and a convenience sampling methodology. The study uses frequency analysis, confirmatory factor analysis, item-level summary statistics, linear regression analysis, moderating analysis, and simple plots. The results indicate that integrating and compromising managers are significantly and positively associated with innovation performance while dominating, obliging, and avoiding managers are significantly and negatively related to innovation performance. Job satisfaction significantly and positively moderates the links between integrating and compromising managers and innovation performance. Job satisfaction significantly and negatively affects the relationships between dominating, obliging, and avoiding managers and innovation performance. The study focuses on some supermarkets and treats a low number of respondents. Conflict management strategies reflect employee perceptions that might lead to attributive misconceptions. The paper exclusively portrays how job satisfaction moderates links between management styles in dispute resolution and novelty. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How do nonstate organizations carry out their programs in political contexts hostile to civil society activity? This paper examines the case of refugee-supporting organizations in Turkey, which hosts over 3.6 million Syrians under a temporary protection regime. While the Turkish state has taken a central role in refugee reception, nonstate organizations have played a sizeable role in refugee support. Analyzing interviews with key personnel across 23 organizations in Istanbul, the paper finds that organizational capacity and organizational identity together explain variations in CSO-state relations. While high-capacity organizations that adopt a variety of "rights-based" and "needs-based" identities will cooperate with state institutions, lower-capacity organizations use comparable signifiers to justify selective engagement or avoidance of state institutions. The paper argues that analyzing how organizations negotiate their identities can help explain variations in CSO-state relations in restrictive contexts without relying on a priori assumptions about CSO alignment with or opposition to the state. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The pollution haven hypo thesis (PHH) postulates that foreign direct investment (FDI) inflows can increase environmental deterioration in developing countries as multinational firms tend to transfer their dirty industries to these countries. Turkey, as a developing economy, has witnessed intense FDI inflows over the last decades. Within this scope, the goal of this paper is to examine whether the pollution haven hypothesis (PHH) prevails in Turkey within the scope of the environmental Kuznets curve (EKC) hypothesis over the period 1970–2016. To that end, the paper employs unit root and cointegration methods based on the nonlinear smooth transition models. The empirical findings of the paper indicate that both hypotheses are valid in Turkey. The findings also imply that environmental quality in Turkey is negatively related to electricity production from renewable energy sources. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the last two decades, urban redevelopment practices in informal settlements in Turkey often neglected inhabitants' spatial practices. The contradictions between conceived and lived space constitutes reactions to these spatial interventions. Against this background, this paper examines the association between place attachment and residents' attitudes toward the redevelopment project in an informally developed neighborhood. Using path and decision tree analysis of survey data, the paper explores the relationship between their attitudes towards and their attachment to the neighborhood. Our findings reveal that individuals' social and physical bonds with their neighborhood shape their attitude toward urban redevelopment. As such, this study confirms the idea that daily interactions between residents reinforce their place attachment in informal settlements where place identity compensates for the (low) quality of life. Still, our findings also demonstrate that residents' identification with the place is a more influential factor, compared to the risk of leaving the neighborhood, on the level of concern against spatial interventions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Covid-19 pandemic negatively affected many sectors including aviation and travel. Travel bans and forced lockdowns prevented transportation activity, especially air travel. Accordingly, huge amounts of emission reductions occurred. On the other hand, travel restrictions are not the only cause of emissions reductions. Changing travel intention in the era of Covid-19 is another important factor that affects aviation emissions. This paper aims to investigate the Landing/Take-Off (LTO) emission changes at Turkish airports. An emission inventory has been implemented for the years 2019 and 2020 to reveal the impacts of Covid-19 on aviation emissions. Domestic, international, and cargo flights have been included in the inventory. According to the results, total emissions of SO2, CO2, CO, NOx, NMVOC, CH4, N2O, and PM2.5 have decreased in 2020 compared to 2019 by 49.8%, 49.7%, 41.0%, 52.6%, 40.0%, 33.8%, 49.8%, and 50.3%, respectively. Total CO2 reductions in the Q2, Q3, and Q4 periods of 2020 compared to that of 2019 are 87%, 50% and 43%, respectively. Another aim of this paper is to find the underlying reasons for emission reductions. For Turkish airports, emission reductions have resulted from travel bans in Q2. After the relaxation of restrictions with the declaration of the "New Normal" in Turkey, flight traffic rebounded to a certain level but was lower than 2019 levels. Therefore, changing travel intention is the main cause of emission reductions in Q3 and Q4 of 2020. The results of this study contribute to both the areas of air pollution and tourism management. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper is focused on study of the geomagnetic field variation response caused by a series of earthquakes with magnitudes of Mw = 7.5–7.8 in Turkey on February 6, 2023. The initial data include high-precision observations of the geomagnetic field with a one-second sampling rate recorded at magnetic observatories in Russia and neighboring countries from middle to high latitudes. The paper analyzes the morphology of the geomagnetic signal, its amplitude-frequency characteristics, pulses in the rate of change and delays of the geomagnetic field response to earthquakes with magnitudes Mw = 7–8 depending on the distance to the source. The results suggest that the geomagnetic effect is detected best in the rate of change recordings, reaching anomalous amplitudes of 10 nT/s. The signal delay ranges from 221 to 592 s depending on the magnetic field component and the distance to the epicenter, which is in the range from 765 to 2650 km for the selected observatories. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Rural communities are intensively based on social capital, the potential of which might seem limited in terms of the possibility to expand beyond rural areas. Today, entrepreneurs, the main actors in achieving and sustaining rural development, have a unique opportunity in the exploitation of social capital in rural areas by utilizing the digital platforms. These new online entrepreneurs have become critical to the success of rural areas as they mobilize online resources to exploit the full potential of their local products in the global economy, thus remaining local while acting global. This process is illustrated by the development of the alternative food network as well as social networks that connect rural potential to the rest of the world. This paper aims to understand the role of such social networks in e-commerce by analysing entrepreneurial characteristics and the ecosystem of their enterprises through case studies. In addition, the network characteristics of chosen enterprises are examined under three main subjects: (i) types of relations with rural residents; (ii) relations with suppliers (both producers and logistics); and iii) the extent of their networks in the e-marketplace. Online entrepreneurs whose business is related to rural agricultural products are selected as case study examples. The data are derived from the results of interviews, and visuals are used to map out their entrepreneurial networks and ecosystems. The conclusions of this paper are: (i) by using online channels, rural entrepreneurs are able to broaden their market; (ii) agricultural lands are being protected since rural entrepreneurs use the potentials of local natural resources; and (iii) these enterprises are financially self-sustaining. The positive impact on local rural development by online rural entrepreneurs is obvious. However, to expand this impact on a regional scale, the promotion of public policies and planning are necessary. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents abstracts of research papers on magnetic resonance (MR) imaging (MRI) technology presented at the 2009 European Society for Magnetic Resonance in Medicine Biology (ESMRMB) Congress held in Antalya, Turkey from October 1 to 3, including atypical Virchow-Robin space in brain MRI, intracranial extramedullary hematopoiesis and concurrent cystic astrocytoma on a patient with thalassemia major and MRI of Dyke-Davidoff-Masson syndrome.

This paper investigates the long run relationship among sentiment, which is defined as the aggregate investor attitude, housing credit and prices, and supply in Turkish housing market over the period of 2010:01 and 2018:06. The empirical results indicate that there is a long run relation among above stated variables. This study confirms the role of credit in explaining the increases in house prices. Importantly, this paper finds that the sentiment is significant in forecasting housing credit volume and supply on housing in the short run. The results also highlight the importance of sentiment as a factor at work in explaining the housing prices and supply of dwellings in the long run. Moreover, counterfactual scenarios on house price path suggests that the housing prices are sensitive to changes in sentiment as in credit volume, but with a lesser magnitude. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In designing control systems, it is known that fractional-order proportional integral derivative (FOPID) controllers often provide greater flexibility than conventional proportional integral derivative (PID) controllers. This higher level of flexibility has proven to be extremely valuable for various applications such as vibration suppression in structural engineering. In this paper, we study the optimization of FOPID controllers using twelve well-established algorithms to minimize structural responses under seismic excitations. The algorithms include crystal structure algorithm (CryStAl), stochastic paint optimizer, particle swarm optimization, krill herd, harmony search, ant colony optimization, genetic algorithm, grey wolf optimizer, Harris hawks optimization, sparrow search algorithm, hippopotamus optimization algorithm, and duck swarm algorithm. In addition to highlighting the benefits of fractional calculus in structural control, this study provides a detailed analysis of FOPID controllers as well as a brief description of the algorithms used to optimize them. To evaluate the efficiency of the proposed techniques, two building models with different numbers of stories are examined. FOPID controllers are designed based on oustaloup's approximation and the El Centro earthquake data. Using five well-known metrics, the performances of the developed methods are evaluated against five earthquake scenarios, including the recent earthquake in Turkey. A non-parametric (Friedman) test is also employed to compare the algorithms based on their corresponding vibration reduction. The findings of this analysis show that CryStAl consistently performs better than the other algorithms for both building models, thus resulting in superior vibration suppression. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How social problems are constructed within social partnerships has significant effects on the management, impact, and survival of those partnerships. To explore how social problems are constructed, we adopt a social-symbolic work perspective, which highlights the variety of forms of work involved in this process, how they interact, and the impact of context on that process. Empirically, we focus on two social partnerships in Turkey that both addressed gender inequality but constructed that problem in very different terms. Our study suggests that the differences in how they came to construct the problem of gender inequality in Turkey was tied to the qualities of two forms of social-symbolic work—relational work and practice work—in which they engaged: the partnership that constructed gender inequality as an embedded problem engaged in extensive relational work and deep practice work; in contrast, the partnership that constructed the problem as disembedded engaged in efficient relational work and shallow practice work. Further, we observed that the construction of the problem of gender inequality was tied to different outcomes: an embedded social construction of the problem was associated with holistic outcomes on a more limited scale; a disembedded construction of the problem was associated with simpler outcomes on a greater scale. The paper contributes to the literature on social partnerships by showing how social problems are constructed through partners' work and how this affects their impact and sustainability. It also extends the literature on social-symbolic work by highlighting the interplay of different forms of work in constructing social problems. Finally, it contributes to research on gender inequality and organizations by showing how the work of social partnerships can shape conceptions of gender inequality at the meso level. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since the seminal paper of Nelson and Plosser (J Monet Econ 10(2):139–162, 1982), analyzing the nature of shocks to macroeconomic and financial data has attracted great attention and it continues to be up-to-date, especially, in conjunction with the advances in unit root literature. This paper examines the persistence in macroeconomic and financial variables for Turkey by means of the recent developments in the quantile autoregression models to account for non-normal distributions, structural changes, and asymmetric dynamics. The results show that while the conventional unit root approaches fail to reject the null hypothesis of unit root for most the of 30 macroeconomic and financial time series, the nonlinear quantile unit root test with smooth structural changes supports evidence on a stable long-run equilibrium for 23 variables. It further reveals asymmetric persistence in most of the Turkey's macroeconomic and financial data, implying that the effect of an economic shock in inflationary state is different than that in recessionary state. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents total factor productivity (TFP) growth analysis with a panel Stochastic Frontier Approach (SFA) for 26 Türkiye regions from 2004 to 2020. The study is a pioneer in the literature on decomposing TFP growth components at the regional level with the translog production function for the Turkish economy. This work has a fresh approach regarding adjusting the schooling of employment and involving macroeconomic factors in the inefficiency function. The numerous specification tests show considerable production inefficiencies. Therefore, the production frontier is estimated using the True Fixed Effects (TFE) model. The empirical findings reveal that human capital is the primary driver of output growth. Technical efficiency is estimated to be 90.6% on average, with 9.4% of potential output lost due to technical inefficiency. It has been determined that there has been technical progress in labor-saving. Trade has a negative effect on technical efficiency. These findings contribute to understanding TFP change in the Turkish economy with regional data. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper scrutinizes the role of the principal policy objective of military intervention in conditioning citizen attitudes for the use of force. Extending the scope of analysis beyond the independent effects, it next assesses how the effects of two core variables of intervention, namely international organizations' approval of the operation and the regime type of the target country, vary for interventions with differing mandates. The results of the conjoint experiment in two dissimilar cases, the US and Turkey, show that despite substantial changes in relative support for different types of operations, policy objective is still a highly potent determinant of individual attitudes. The results also concur that compared to foreign policy restraint and humanitarian missions, individuals are more sensitive to international organizations' endorsements of the use of force for peace and internal political change operations. Finally, individuals are significantly disapproving of operations that seek internal political changes in democratic targets, though in contrast to the democratic peace theory, for other types of interventions, they are indifferent to the regime type of the opponent. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper investigates if individuals' negative assessments of the future drive micro-level reluctance for international cooperation and reciprocal behavior, a core principle of multilateralism. To test our theoretical expectations, we field online survey experiments on a sample of over 3000 respondents in the US and Turkey in October–November 2020. The experimental results show that on average, individuals are fairly sensitive to target countries' policy actions and are inclined to reciprocate when contemplating whether to increase contributions to UN or consent to bilateral trade liberalization. Yet, further analyses concur that individual inclinations to reciprocate are substantially moderated by their future expectations. Specifically, individuals who are more pessimistic about their material prospects remain fairly indifferent to the positive actions of other countries, but are more likely to penalize negative foreign policy actions by reciprocating in kind. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study aims to analyze the time-varying effects of global economic policy uncertainty (GEPU) shocks on macroeconomic activity in Turkey over the quarterly period of 1999q1 to 2020q4. To this end, the study uses the GEPU index developed by Davis (Working paper 22740, National Bureau of Economic Research, 2016) and employs the time-varying parameter vector autoregression (TVP-VAR) model. Empirical evidence shows that the GEPU shocks have adverse effects on the macroeconomic activity as they result in declines in share prices, investment, employment, consumption, and GDP growth. It is also evident that these effects vary over time, with the highest impact observed following the crises periods such as the 9/11 attacks, the Iraq invasion, the global financial crisis (GFC), and the Covid-19 pandemic. The time-varying impacts typically reach the maximum in the first and second lag periods, and the most severe impacts of uncertainty are observed on share prices and investment. The study also examines three substantial events (the 9/11 attacks, the GFC, and the Brexit referendum) and finds that the responses of the underlying variables to GEPU shocks vary both in magnitude and signs over the sample period. The responses of the variables are mainly more severe during the periods when geopolitical and economic concerns are high compared to periods of political crises. Overall, the findings from the analyses indicate that the Turkish economy still maintains its fragile structure and suggest that the adverse macroeconomic effects of foreign uncertainty shocks do not remain the same over time. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Homeownership rates have declined in several countries including Denmark and Turkey since 2010. A majority of the decline in homeownership has been observed among low income holders. This variation finding comparative case study compares similar patterns of neoliberal housing policies to examine wealth inequalities based on homeownership despite fundamental differences in housing markets and welfare state provision. The comparison of Denmark and Turkey reveals similar adoption of policies that support financialization as a strategy to recover from financial crises. This paper examines how states have supported financialization with policies that allowed deregulations in the housing market to create an enabling environment for construction and real estate-specific growth, and how neoliberal housing policies positioned homeownership, a wealth symbol, as the core tenet of asset-based welfare that increased wealth inequalities. The outcome of this paper shows that neoliberal housing policies have generated new forms of inequality between low and high-income earners to access housing in both countries in different ways to produce a similar outcome. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Samos Island (Aegean Sea) Earthquake occurred on 30 October 2020. It produced a tsunami that impacted coastal communities, ground shaking that was locally amplified in some areas and that led to collapse of structures with 118 fatalities in both Greece and Turkey, and wide-ranging geotechnical effects including rockfalls, landsliding, and liquefaction. As a result of the global COVID-19 pandemic, the reconnaissance of this event did not involve the deployment of international teams, as would be typical for an event of this size. Instead, following initial deployments of separate Greek and Turkish teams, the reconnaissance and documentation efforts were managed in a coordinated manner with the assistance of international partners. This coordination ultimately produced a multi-agency joint report published on the 2-month anniversary of the earthquake, and this special issue. This paper provides an overview of the reconnaissance activities undertaken to document the effects of this important event and summarizes key lessons spanning topic areas from seismology to emergency response. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

User equipment (UE)'s operating system (OS) and category types are important factors that are affecting the end-user performance in a given mobile network operator (MNO)'s infrastructure. For this reason, fair and statistically accurate observed network performance differences of UE's OSs based on category types, MNOs or locations can be of interest for mobile telecommunication ecosystem players. This paper's focus is on performance comparisons of UE OSs (including Android, IOS (iPhone Operating System) and Windows phones) over different UE categories, MNOs and locations based on previously collected end-to-end nationwide crowd-sourced data measurements in Turkey. The analysis results performed in this paper uses statistical comparisons of unpaired observations due to imbalance between number of observations between all OSs and yield insight on how the mobile OS types' network performances differ using some important Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) such as downlink (DL) speed, latency, jitter and packet loss (PL). The outcome of the analysis indicate that Android devices perform better in terms of DL speed among all MNOs, whereas IOS devices are better in terms of latency values. On the other hand depending on the UE category, the performances of MNOs may vary when IOS and Android OSs are compared based on different KPIs. Additionally, IOS has shown better performance than Android in large geographical areas of Turkey. Finally, the business aspects of performing the proposed statistical OS comparisons from the perspectives of OS developers, MNOs, device manufacturers, and end-users are highlighted. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While the whole world struggles with the COVID-19 pandemic, there are many different measures taken by countries. In this sense, the distribution of free masks to citizens between the ages of 20–65 in Turkey is one of the important measures taken against to spread of the pandemic. This distribution process is carried out through pharmacies and people can obtain their masks from any pharmacy in their area of residence. However, this situation may cause some pharmacies to be very busy, and thus social distance cannot be maintained and health and safety of the people may be threatened. In this paper, we aim to prioritize pharmacies so that only determined pharmacies in certain regions perform mask distribution process to prevent virus transmission. For this purpose, Esenler district is taken into consideration for a pilot study which is one of the risky regions in terms of virus spread in Istanbul, Turkey. Multi-criteria decision-making approach (MCDM) is used because of the necessity of handling many factors in decision-making process and the contradiction of evaluation factors in the prioritization of pharmacies. In order to best model the uncertainty in the decision process, the MCDM approach is applied in a fuzzy environment. In addition, spherical fuzzy AHP and VIKOR MCDM approaches are used as novel hybrid method in this paper. As a result of spherical fuzzy multi-criteria analysis, the pharmacies that need to provide free mask distribution in the Esenler region have been successfully identified. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper provides new insights into the growth-maximizing size of government in Turkey. Unlike previous studies that traditionally use the share of government spending in GDP as a proxy variable of government size, in this paper we consider a fairly large number of proxy variables ranging from the share of tax revenues in GDP to the share of public investment in total investment. After reviewing the potential non-linear relationship between government size and growth, we estimate various thresholds for government size that maximize growth. To this end, we use the threshold autoregressive model proposed by Hansen (1996: 413-430; 2000: 575-603)) and apply it to Turkey's annual time-series data for the period from 1974 to 2019. Overall, we arrive at the following main result: Government size is non-linearly related to growth, confirming the existence of a growth-maximizing threshold for any measure of government size, beyond which growth tends to slow down as government size continues to increase. More precisely, the results show that the estimated thresholds for government size lie within the range of 4.28–15.19%, depending on the definition or proxy variable representing government size. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study delves into the repercussions of the 2023 earthquake in Turkey, particularity its impact on air pollution. A year post-event, it is evident that scientific literature has paid limited attention to monitoring the situation. However, the release of hazardous substances, such as asbestos, lead, and other toxins, from damaged structures poses a significant threat by contaminating nearby air, soil, and water sources, thereby jeopardizing ecosystems and public well-being. The improper disposal of waste post-earthquake and the presence of mining and oil refinery sites in the region contribute to potential air pollutants. These circumstances create challenging environments conducive to the spread of respiratory diseases, with potential long-term health and social consequences. Unfortunately, existing data gaps hinder a comprehensive understanding of the situation. This paper pioneers the reporting and analysis of data regarding potential sources of air pollution resulting from the earthquake in Turkey. It also pinpoints gaps in knowledge, outlining areas that demand further investigation. To effectively prevent and mitigate air pollution risks and associated health concerns linked to earthquakes, strategic recommendations are proposed. A key suggestion is the establishment of post-disaster air pollution monitoring systems capable of swiftly identifying emerging health issues, facilitating efficient responses, and curtailing potential long-term effects of the disaster. The paper underscores the necessity for continuous health monitoring of the affected population to mitigate possible adverse impacts on human health. These strategies play a pivotal role in reducing the likelihood of air pollution, supporting emergency response and recovery initiatives, and fostering new dedicated scientific studies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the susceptibility of post-conflict democratization processes to civilian forms of ethnic violence. Shifting the focus away from institutions and political elites, which dominate analyses on democracy and ethnic violence, the paper analyzes social relations and struggles among civilians during post-conflict democratization. Through an analysis of anti-Kurdish communal violence in twenty-first-century Turkey, the paper shows that social movements led by minorities demanding recognition make ethnicity a politically salient cleavage. This triggers contention over ethnic boundaries, resulting in civilian forms of ethnic violence. A key finding of this paper is that violence is not merely an outcome of increasing polarization and division but also a strategy employed by dominant populations to reinforce former boundaries and reduce uncertainties surrounding the existing ones. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The influence of Covid-19 pandemic crisis on rates of return is analyzed in this paper in the light of possible data manipulation related to reporting systems provided by the administration in the USA, Turkey and Poland. The study used various methods of analyzing the relationship of a discrete, non-discrete and dichotomous data nature between the studied variables. As a result, the strongest reaction of the market was observed in Turkey followed by the USA and Poland. It can be concluded that the reaction of the surveyed markets was influenced by the data manipulations. The added value of the article is related to the use of various methods to study phenomena and detect the impact of data manipulation on the markets. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The author of this paper has recently shown that daily-mean self-potential (SP) time series recorded at Urla station, Turkey, exhibit a unit-root nonstationary behavior with weakly correlated stationary differences driven by stable noise of tail index around 1.12–1.15. This work mainly aims to assess whether the Exponentiated-Exponential Cauchy (EEC) family distributions could be utilized as an alternative to the stable distributions. The EEC family distributions have many advantages as they have closed-form representations. Those goodness-of-fit statistics, relative strengths and predictive abilities of the three EEC family distributions with two- (Cauchy), three- (EEC-3) and four (EEC-4) parameters were compared with that of the stable one. The Akaike Information Criterion (AIC)-based relative strength for the EEC-3 candidate indicated that it is approximately 1.85 times more likely to be the best approximating model than the stable one. Additionally, those considerably smaller relative mean absolute errors (RMAE) for the EEC-3 model indicated that the asymptotic tail properties of the empirical distribution could be better represented in comparison with the stable model. The results of this work revealed, on the example of Urla, that an EEC-3 distribution would plausibly the stable one. We hope the findings of this paper would provide many advantages and facilitate the numerical computations in solving problems arising from the use of stable laws. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Even though health expenditures are one of the significant determinants of accumulation of human capital and economic growth, researchers have paid less attention to unveiling interactions between health care expenditures and economic performance. The main objective of this study is to investigate disaggregated health care expenditures and economic growth nexus in Türkiye from 1979 to 2019 by using an asymmetric causality approach. The main empirical findings could be briefly summed up as follows: there exist asymmetric causal effects running from total health expenditures, out-of-pocket health expenditures and voluntary health expenditures to economic growth, while there is no asymmetric causal effect from compulsory health expenditures to economic growth. The policy inferences of empirical results for enhancing the productivity of health expenditures are stated in the body of the paper. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Nowadays, logistics is one of the most important tools in disaster relief operations. The logistic planning is essential and a key component in covering the initial needs in the immediate aftermath of any disaster. Planning is both necessary and practical, as it is generally possible to predict the types of disasters that should affect a given location and the needs that such disasters will be likely to cause. Transport planning, reception and distribution of emergency supplies, type and quantity of the resources, the way of procurement and storage of the supplies, the tools of the tracking and means transportation to the stricken area, the specialization of teams participating in the operation and plan of cooperation between these teams, are some vital life-saving coordination roles after natural disasters are connected directly to logistic planning. Turkey is located in one of the most active earthquake and volcanic regions which causes to many major earthquake-prone, in the world with a majority of the population living in these earthquake-prone areas. Earthquakes are one of the major disasters that require emergency logistic planning strategies due to their devastating effects, the large-scale natural disasters could cause major problem on commodities such as food, medicine etc. In this paper, a game theoretical model for emergency logistic planning is developed. To do this a cooperative game model is constructed from a flow problem which occurred after an earthquake in Istanbul. Several solution concepts for maximizing the transferred commodity are given. The paper ends with a conclusion and outlook to future studies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

2 Sahin Y, Tayfur G. 3D modelling of surface spreading and underground dam groundwater recharge: Egri Creek Subbasin, Turkey. The study of Peksezer ([1]) was the first one, which had investigated the use of the artificial recharge of groundwater by the surface recharge basins, and the underground dam for the Egri Creek Subbasin. [Extracted from the article]

This paper estimates the effect of a sugar-factory privatization policy on sugar beet acreages in Turkey. It finds that sugar beet acreages decreased by more than 15% due to the 2018 privatization of several sugar factories. Farmers decreased their contracted acreages in the middle of 2018, after the privatization announcement but before the actual transfer of the institutions. Production continued to decrease in the following years for the farms that were in the "catchment area" of the privatized factory group. However, for the farms that were in the area of the factories in which privatization was subsequently canceled, the negative effect of the announcement vanished. The results show that privatization policies can significantly affect markets even before the transfer of the institutions to the private sector. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study investigates the effect of student response system (SRS) on students' achievement and achievement emotions in an English course. The participants were 9th grade students (n = 83, 40 female and 43 male) attending a high school in Turkey. Study involved one experiment and two control groups. In the experimental group, SRS was used to ask questions and to provide immediate feedback to the students. Paper and pencil form of the same questions (that were used in the experimental group) were asked to the students in the control group 1 and immediate feedback was provided. These questions were not used in the control group 2. Before and after the implementation, the English Achievement Test and Class Related and Test Related Achievement Emotions Questionnaires were administered to the experimental and control groups. Mixed ANOVA was used to examine the within and between group differences. Semi-structured interviews were carried out with experimental group students. The results showed that using an SRS had statistically significant effect on students' achievement in English. In terms of the achievement emotions, the SRS had a statistically significant effect on decreasing students' test anxiety. The SRS and using questions and immediate feedback in a paper and pencil format positively impacted students' class-related boredom and enjoyment, and test relief. The results of the interviews supported these findings. Students reported that lessons with SRS were more enjoyable and SRS helped them to learn the subject matter better. They also reported that SRS helped them for the self-assessment of their progress. The findings of the study also showed that technical problems that arise from the lack of internet infrastructure might cause time management problems during the implementation of SRS. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The city of Trabzon has no site classification map or site-specific analyses representing the assessment earthquake hazard so far, although Trabzon had been influenced and damaged due to earthquakes that occurred particularly in the North Anatolian Fault zone both in the recent and distant past. This paper presents the site classification and analyzes the site-specific pseudo-spectral acceleration (PSA) for densely populated areas of Trabzon. The coastline and the east and west edges of the city demonstrate minimum Vs30 in the overall study area from 175 to 396 m/s, respectively, which falls CD to DE class in NEHRP, and ZC to ZE in TBDY. The Vs30 of the remaining areas vary between 347 and 851 m/s, representing CD to BC in NEHRP and ZD to ZB in Turkish Building Regulation. The wide range of Vs30 is mostly due to the depth of the volcanic main rock, altered and agglomerated settings of dominant formation. The estimated PSA curves along the coast side of Trabzon including the lowest Vs30 demonstrate significantly greater spectral acceleration values than the design spectrum, particularly in TA–TB range that was used for almost whole constructions in the study area. Also, PSAs of the neighborhoods mostly classified as ZC in TDBY indicate overlapping with design spectrums and peak values are pretty close to limits. As a result, the proposed paper demonstrates that the earthquake hazard should not be underestimated, in particular considering the high possibility of well-known frequent ruptures on the east side of the North Anatolian Fault. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Decomposition analysis is a proven approach to highlight the trends in energy economics and to clarify the changing factors in energy consumption. In Turkey, industrial sector is one of the major drivers of economy, which accounts for 32% of the final energy consumption. This paper uses the logarithmic mean Divisia index (LMDI) to divide the total energy consumption growth of ten Turkish manufacturing industries into activity effect, structure effect, and intensity effect in the period from 2005 to 2014. Manufacturing subsectors consist of (a) food products, beverages, and tobacco, (b) textile and textile products, (c) wood and wood products, (d) pulp, paper, and paper products; publishing and printing, (e) chemicals, chemical products, and man-made fibers, (f) rubber and plastic products, (g) non-metallic mineral products, (h) primary metals, (i) equipment goods, and (j) other manufacturing. Energy consumption of total manufacturing industry rose from 25,013 ktoe to 27,590 ktoe within the period. The subsector (a), (b), (c), (d), (e), (f), and (i) analyses results reveal that the activity effect has significant contribution to energy consumption, while structure and intensity effects are negligible. On the other hand, for the energy-intensive industries, influence of structure and intensity effects has observed simultaneously. The results also show that intensity and activity effects follow similar trends. Energy intensity of manufacturing industry has followed a slightly decreasing route (0.288 ktoe/$2005 in 2005 and 0.219 ktoe/$2005 in 2014) in the period, which is an indicative of contribution of activity changes, energy efficient technologies, and other energy efficiency efforts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper scrutinizes the role of Turkish politicians' threat perception on negative descriptions of Armenians between 1960 and 1980. In so doing, it brings together the theoretical insights of group position theory with the scholarship on the perception of non-Muslim minorities in Turkey. Building on a comprehensive, mixed-method content analysis of Turkish parliamentary proceedings, it demonstrates that Turkish politicians are more likely to make negative comments about Armenians while debating about national security and foreign threats than when speaking about other topics. The paper concludes that perceived threats contribute to the negative descriptions of Armenians in Turkish politics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Research on counselors-in-training is necessary to improve the success of the counseling process. The counseling skills used by counselors are critical to managing this process. This paper aims to contribute to the existing body of knowledge in counseling pedagogy by examining the role of counselor characteristics as a mediator in the relationship between counselors-in-training values and counseling skills. In this study, we had 524 counselors-in-training from various universities in Turkey. The results showed that the values of counselors-in-training significantly predict their counselor characteristics. Specifically, the values of the counselors-in-training predict their counseling skills, with the mediating role of the counselor characteristics. Additionally, the counselor characteristics of the counselors-in-training significantly predicted their counseling skills. Various practices and methods can be applied to improve counseling skills. Given that the development of values allows counselors-in-training to acquire important counselor characteristics, value education is essential in the training of counselors. Individuals who acquire essential counselor characteristics can use their counseling skills effectively. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract—This paper analyzes the use of the automated aftershock hazards assessment system (AFCAST) through the example of a series of aftershocks of the Mw 7.8 earthquake in Turkey of February 6, 2023 (the Pazarcik earthquake). The paper presents automated estimates of the aftershock activity area, the magnitude of the strongest aftershock, and the duration of the hazardous period, yielded using data on the main shock and on the first aftershocks. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Energy poverty is a challenging issue that hampers economic and sustainable development and lowers people's standard of living. While trying to understand energy poverty, it is imperative to focus on the disadvantaged individuals mentioned in the literature, as they are often most vulnerable to the problem. Focusing on them is essential to achieving sustainable development goals, especially in developing countries, particularly regarding poverty, energy poverty, and gender equality. Therefore, the paper aims to examine the impact of economic precarity on working-age females' energy poverty perceptions using 2018–2020 TURKSTAT-SILC pooled cross-sectional data. Our findings from the bivariate probit, multivariate probit and Bayesian bivariate probit models suggested that economic precarity has a disruptive role on females' energy poverty perceptions. Furthermore, inefficient energy use is an important factor in influencing females' perceptions of energy poverty. Females' inability to pay required housing expenses increases their perceived energy poverty. Therefore, social-welfare policies and energy policies should be considered together by the policymakers to resolve females' energy poverty problem to achieve a more sustainable future. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The aim of this paper is to investigate the possible impact of foreign direct investment inflows (FDI) on environmental pollution and to test the validity of the pollution haven hypothesis (PHH) in the case of Turkey over the period 1970–2020. For this purpose, we apply the Fourier approximation to determine stochastic properties of the variables that are FDI, economic growth, energy consumption, and CO2 emissions used in empirical analysis and the relationship between them. The advantage of the Fourier approximation is capable of capturing possible structural breaks in unknown forms and numbers in the series. According to Fourier KPSS and Fourier FADF tests, all series are stationary at order one, I (1). Fourier Shin and Fourier ADL cointegration tests put forth evidence of the existence of a long-term relationship between CO2, GDP, EC, and FDI. FMOLS expanded with Fourier terms suggesting that FDI has relatively little but a positive impact on CO2 emissions, so we conclude that PHH is valid for Turkey. The other finding reveals that there exists an inverted U-shape relationship between economic growth and CO2 emissions. According to this result, the environmental Kuznets curve (EKC) hypothesis for Turkey is also supported. Another remark of this paper is that energy consumption significantly increases environmental degradation in Turkey. These findings also are supported by Fourier Toda and Yamamoto causality test. There is a causality relationship from GDP, EC, and FDI to CO2 emissions. These findings offer useful recommendations for policymakers: the FDI, which uses new and clean technology, should be encouraged and implemented energy policies should be energy intensity reducer and efficiency increaser for reducing environmental pollution in Turkey. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The smarter world needs more efforts to purposeful manage and usage of technologies, science, artificial intelligence, and artificial neural networks, as their product. One of the main tools to facilitate collecting beneficial information is reviewing the publications of the target domain. To this end, the present paper attempts to categorize recent trends and innovations in the application of artificial neural networks in water quality and pollution research. The most prevalent methods for water pollution and quality prediction modeling during 2011–2020 were BPNN and normal MLP.. Conducting and comparing other analytical methods such as ANN, RBFNN, LSTM, and CNN to find accurate results are in the next orders. Moreover, along with the emerging and development of the internet of things (IoT), it was observed that IoT as a real-time technology for collecting relevant data, which appeared in the water quality analysis since 2016–2017, was used increasingly in 2019 and 2020. Furthermore, reviewed papers revealed that pH, chemical oxygen demand, and biochemical oxygen demand were the most water quality indicators. Regionally, drivers in China were the most investigated sites during the last decade, and then India and Turkey were the second and third place. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The purpose of this paper is to examine whether there is a bubble in the Turkish housing market during the period of 2006–2018. In conjunction with the irrational bubble theory, this study applies the Pitros and Arayici (Int J Hous Mark Anal 9(2):190-221, 2016. 10.1108/IJHMA-01-2015-0002) bubble algorithmic model. The empirical results reveal that the Turkish housing market was in a bubble during 2013–2017 period, the peak/last year of the bubble is the year 2017 and that the bubble-bust occurred in 2018. The foremost contribution of this study is that it is the first to document a historical housing bubble episode for Turkey using the premises of irrational bubble theory and the first to apply an algorithmic approach to assess the bubble risk for the period of 2006 and 2018. As to the implications, this documented model may be used as a tool to enhance policymakers' knowledge toward the early identification of housing bubbles. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The organic agricultural production system is considered to be the best alternative to the conventional system in order to solve agricultural externality problems. The adoption of such systems provide environmental, social, and financial benefits to the related communities. The related community may receive economic benefits although they might not recognize those benefits. The current paper examines prospective organic wheat production's positive impacts on Turkish economy. This research seeks to find the optimal cultivated land requirement to be allocated for organic wheat production, and contributes to the available literature by measuring environmental and social effects using the proxy values of regular wheat production in the country. Results dictate that the social optimum amount of conventional wheat production must be 1.3 million hectares. If the annual negative externality of wheat production, which is 227.5 USD/ha, is taken into account, the total annual external cost would be 1,416,061,536 USD/year. The importance of conversion and superiority of organic farming are stressed in the literature only at the micro-level or farm-level rather than the macroeconomic level. Macroeconomic results examined in the current paper complete micro-level studies in the context of agricultural externalities. The study indicates that macroeconomic efficiency of organic production is higher than the conventional system. However, it is suggested that a mild transition path be implemented for better land conversion in developing countries such as Turkey. The system of good agricultural practices may have some advantages for this path. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Evidence regarding cost behavior mostly comes from big listed companies. Cost behavior of SMEs, which are backbones of economy, is under-researched. This paper intends to fill this gap by providing evidence on cost stickiness from SMEs in an emerging economy. Cost stickiness refers to the notion that costs increase and decrease by differing magnitude for a specific change in the activity volume. Analyses of data for Turkish SMEs from 2013 to 2017 indicate that; total costs, cost of goods sold and selling, general and administrative costs are sticky in varying degrees. Cost stickiness of total costs and selling general and administrative costs reverses following a revenue decline period. The degree of stickiness of all cost categories is positively related to asset intensity and employee intensity while the degree of stickiness of total costs and cost of goods sold is negatively related to debt intensity. The degree of cost stickiness is higher for small revenue decreases than for greater revenue decreases. Finally, firms in different industries have different cost behaviors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, intersex, and queer (LGBTIQ) individuals constitute a large group of minority groups in Turkey. Because of the scarcity of non-existent systematic reviews on the sexual orientation discrimination of LGBTIQ individuals in Turkey, the present study aims to outline the major discriminatory practices against these individuals and fills the gap through a systematic literature review based on rigorous criteria. The present paper examines 21 selected papers, explores key emerging themes and recent developments to identify research gaps, and provides areas for future research. Therefore, "discrimination in employment and at the workplace," "discrimination in health," "discrimination in public service," and "discrimination by the government" were identified as the major themes of the current review. Through these themes, it was further revealed that the key pillars of LGBT discrimination in Turkey rest on the legal frameworks, social institutions, and norms. The best ways to eradicate LGBT discrimination in Turkey rest on modifying, changing, or creating LGBT inclusive/supportive policies within these pillars. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A correction to this paper has been published: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00024-021-02772-5 [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]